7 mar 2013

S @ Tadpole navigating @ Staff of Life market

yoga is beginning to loosen me up

My Mother

She admitted another

doctor loved her.

Her thyroid man —

appointments in New York City.

She wore her best

black wool Empire waist

lipstick & pearls.

Where would they have trysted?

She denied it.

I liked to imagine

the out-of-the-way bar

dry martinis

rings from their cigarettes.

John Wieners [pic by Jerome Mallmann]

from John Wieners's Selected Poems: 1958-1984, Black Sparrow, 1998:

A poem for record players

The scene changes

Five hours later and

I come into a room

where a clock ticks.

I find a pillow to

muffle the sounds I make.

I am engaged in taking away

from God his sound.

The pigeons somewhere

above me, the cough

a man makes down the hall,

the flap of wings

below me, the squeak

of sparrows in the alley.

The scratches I itch

on my scalp, the landing

of birds under the bay

window out my window.

All dull detals

I can only describe to you,

but which are here and

I hear and shall never

give up again, shall carry

with me over the streets

of this seacoast city,

forever; oh, clack your

metal wings, god, you are

mine now in the morning.

I have you by the ears

in the exhaust pipes of

a thousand cars gunning

their motors turning over

all over town.

Some day I will make a list of the presses without which we would not have such poetry (Black Sparrow, New Directions, etc.).

Vanessa Veselka [pic by Kyle Johnson]

from Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen, Red Lemonade, 2011:

“Why do you say it’s the war?”

“Because that’s what’s driving everything right now.”

“Yeah, but when I talk about the war people act like I’m delusional and just trying to ruin their 70s t-shirt glitter decal fantasy march.”

She laughed and shook her head.

“That’s because you talk about the war all like it’s already happening. It’s not happening for most people. Some of us, yes, but not for everyone.”

“Because they’re fucking desensitized automatons that reproduce through violence?”

“People are on their own learning curve and outrage is a personal thing. We’re short on it already.”

She pulled a box off a shelf.

“And,” she said, “when people do figure it out, they need something on the other end that they can be part of.”

Guernica: 

Where does that contrarian, stubborn streak in you come from? [from Melissa Seley's interview of Vanessa Veselka]

Vanessa Veselka: 

Oh, God. Well, I had this thing happen over and over when I was a kid. When I was thirty-five someone finally explained it to me when they saw it. I had experiences from the first grade on where a teacher or somebody would get upset with me and get more and more agitated around me. I did not understand what it was about me that was so upsetting. I have a lot of annoying characteristics, but it wasn’t that simple. I began to understand later in life that in a situation with someone of authority, they frequently think I’m not respecting their authority when I actually don’t even see it. I’m authority blind. I’ve learned to go, “Oh, they’re in a position of authority and they think I’m intentionally being rude about it. I don’t mean that at all.” I’m somebody with authority Asperger’s. I’ve had to learn social cues. Like, “Oh, they need my face to look softer. They need me to look down more. I need to preface my sentences with, ‘Perhaps we could look at it this way . . .’” . . .

Della’s question is: Can you sit still on fire? When you don’t agree with all of the options provided, when you’re not willing to be complicit, when you’re not okay with what’s going on around you, can you sit still on fire? Can you be there and be fully present to everything when it’s not right and be alive? Della’s crisis is a crisis of withholding. She had this idea that she hasn’t given her consent to the world to be the way it is, and because of that, she’s negotiating whether she’s in or out. . . .

I learned to live in my own head. I learned to follow intuition and more than anything, I learned what was important to me. As pompous as it sounds, freedom means more to me than anything (except maybe kindness), and I know exactly what I’ll give up to get or keep it. That’s important when you’re writing and bringing work to an industry that assumes its authority is absolute. What I got from those years was a clear sense of what the deal was: I don’t have to agree and you don’t have to like it. I don’t have to listen to you if it goes against my instincts and you don’t have to give me your money. It’s a reasonable deal on all sides.

Leslie Marmon Silko

from Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, 1977:

they went to burn the spines from the cholla and prickly pear. They stood back by the wagon and watched the cows walk up to the cactus cautiously, sneezing at the smoldering ashes. The cows were patient while the green pulp cooled, and then they brought out their wide spotted tongues and ate those strange remains because the hills were barren those years and only the cactus could grow. . . .

Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. . . .

old Ku’oosh waited until the voices of the women could no longer be heard before he moved the chair closer to the bed. He smelled like mutton tallow and mountain sagebrush. He spoke softly, using the old dialect full of origins, as if nothing the old man said were his own but all had been said before and he was only there to repeat it. . . .

She danced, spinning her body, pulling her thighs and hips into sudden motions, bending, sweeping, veering, and lunging — whirling until she was the bull and at the same time the killer, holding out her full skirts like a cape.

The men sitting around tables at the edge of the dance floor pushed themselves away, some stumbling over chairs, spilling their beer in a panic that pounded in their chests like her heels against the floor. The bartender left a towel stuffed in the glass he had been wiping. But they watched; pressing close to one another, shivering in the farthest corner of the bar, they watched her; and when the guitar player finally laid his instrument on the floor and held his head between his hands, she danced on. . . .

The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; as long as people believed the lies, they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other. He wiped the sweat off his face only the sleeve of his jacket. He stood back and looked at the gaping cut in the wire. If the white people never looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it in motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it. . . .

The flowers were all colors of yellow that day — silky yellow petals like wild canary feathers, and blossoms as dark as the center of the sun. . . . Up ahead, a snake stopped and raised its head alertly; the tongue slid in and out and then stopped when it located him. It was a light yellow snake, covered with bright yellow spots, like the wild flowers pulled loose and traveling. . . .

The cinders made hollow crunching noises under his boots. He had come a long way with them; but it was his own two feet that got him there.

a book to read again & again

3 mar 2012

a cloudy day in Santa Cruz
I'm well again after a bout of food poisoning
waiting for delivery of an Ikea bed

with a plastic sack for a head

— after Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Hoping to be stuffed

with wine & chocolate.

Darkest red.

To live a super-strong life

I hold a cardboard insert the way my human holds a titanium plate.

But I am discarded oil.

The dump bares its leavings picked through like a squirrel in the road.

I fly off in a sudden whiff of methane,

the plaything of an orphaned urchin.

It bats around with splintered planks of maple.

Out: my emptied flavor.

I fear I might be punctured. Or I am a lung of airholes.

I beg for Scotch-style reconstruction.

I beg for someone’s Medicare card. A pot sleeping stopover.

Some Epoxy gel.

Connie Deanovich [pic courtesy of Felix: A New Series of Writing]

from Connie Deanovich’s Watusi Titanic, 1996:

Dating Patton

When I’m too busy

I pretend

I’m dating Patton

Battle-scarred

triumphant

exhausted

and pissed

we couple

a couple of

war horses

big on the scene

in our own minds

not minding

wind

snow

veracity

we say anything

to get it done

we feel anything

to get it done

and when we’re

done with each

other

spent

like sparklers

we plant ourselves

in the ground

like neurotic Dobermans

leaving a mark

waiting to grow

again

into two

supreme

pains in the ass

Allen Ginsburg's introduction to the Bhavagad Gita.

Poet Mark Levine on teacher Philip Levine.

28 feb 2013

anyone — a convicted sex offender — can get a gun
kill a mother, birth motherless sons

absence of reason, dumb despair, bitter smell of death
a residential street, a sunny day

Susan Howe [pic by Lawrence Schwartzwald] 

from Susan Howe’s Frame Structure, 1996:

15

The audience applauded

I was welcomed as one returned from the grave.

My imposter stood up

Her speech was — forests, chasms, cataracts —

I replied — Yes, I had been there —

slept with the children every night —

wherever I went — I went when I was sleeping —

All eyes turned on me.

“Liar — Have you seen the Lake of the North?”

she said.

“Have you seen the wreck of a ship?

— and your scalp?

— How did you cross the Great Camped Present?”

My assurance failed

Welcomed to the rock of my banishment

I couldn’t utter a word.

Silence resumed its wild entanglement

Thought resumed its rigid courtesy.

20

. . .

On Monday, massacre, burning, and pillage

On Tuesday, gifts and visits among friends

Warriors wait

hidden in the fierce hearts of children.

21

. . .

Haunted by the thought, the thread we hang on will save us

I bit off and burned my fingers to keep from freezing.

. . .

I the Fly

come from Brighten

hook storm

seawave and salmon

Glass house

Captain Barefoot

gullet of hook

all sky

. . .

Nelson wore a wig

and after battle handed it to his valet

to have the bullets combed out.

T. Zachary Cotler [pic courtesy of The Poetry Foundation]

from T. Zachary Cotler’s Sonnets to the Humans, 2013:

[p8]

Then did you build this gallows,

calling it a natural cause,

consenting to abandon breath,

belief, and memory on it? Was

I one night, with cognac,

under the scaffold,

washing the feet. Because

there is no grace except

of the thinnest

duration, I, too, was

hanged, but at a distant station,

and grace has a half-life; grace

is a state one stage

decayed from perfection.

[p14]

And yet, a weathervane vine might have grown

from the mud of your chests on a road away

from asylum to tell you a wind full of

I could have protected you,

but there is only blew the clothing off

your children, blew into their brains

a knowledge: not because

an icon is a closed gate to its promise,

but because it is an open gate to Silence,

this is why they ran

after their flying shirts and hair

toward a smoking Baal,

trampling lightning-forked flowers,

terrified of nothing.

[p20]

If I stood for you, you stopped

alone on a road by an ocean

with bone ash blown back

on your face — I’d thrown

an urn. Anemones

pulsated: atrium, carnation,

ventricle, anus of icon

of Kali — I’d thought

I was on your knees in the tide

that will cover the road, I down

without devotion, having thrown

what you’ve come to throw and now

with some time to study the end

of my time in you.

26 feb 2013

Kate Greenstreet [pic courtesy of John Gallaher]

from Kate Greenstreet’s Young Tambling, 2013:

g) “Give it to me or strike me dead.” There’s nothing to do but feel the disappointment and see where it guides me.

h) “Some people they start with the bugs — y’know, when they’re kids? Always lookin’ at the bugs and wantin’ to know the different names of the bugs. Kids like that grow up, nobody’s surprised if they’re a scientist of some kind. But it could mean other things.”

i) Some people decide to stop talking and pray instead. Like the trees are cleaning the air, they’re praying for the world. Does that help? I have no idea. I doubt it, but we don’t know what would happen if all the people praying for the world were to suddenly stop. . . .

t) I sure like my new pencil, which is transparent, mechanical, and aqua blue.

u) I need to do something with the stuff I’m ingesting, just being alive in the world. To use it, to see it, to place it in relationship to something else. I have to do that to keep going, and it’s what I can do. It’s what I’m fit for.

v) “The process is: you got a buncha shit laying around. Shit that’s broken.”

w) — The way you do art sounds like a kind of filtration system. Or dry cleaning! But instead of returning the clothes cleaned and pressed, you’d offer some other clothes instead.

— Or a pan of rocks, more like it. If you can live without the clothes and want the rocks, you’ve come to the right place. If you need those same clothes back, try the cleaners across the highway.

25 feb 2013

Lyn Lifshin [pic courtesy of Melusine]

from Lyn Lifshin’s before it’s LIGHT: new poems,1999

The No More Apologizing, the No More Little Laughing Blues [excerpt]

the only place I said what I meant

was in poems. That green was like some

huge forbidden flower that grew so

big it couldn’t even fit in the house . . .

you know I pretended,

pretended, pretended, I

couldn’t stop trying to please

the A, the star, the good girl

on the forehead. The spanking

clean haunted half my life.

But the poems had their own life

and mine finally followed

where the poems were growing,

warm paper skin growing

finally in my real bed

until the room stopped spinning for

good the way it used to when I dressed

up in suits and hair spray

pretending to be all those things I

wasn’t: teacher, good girl, lady,

wife . . .

But now when I hear myself laughing

the apologizing laugh, I know what

swallowing those black seeds can

do and I spit them out. Like tobacco.

(something men could always

do) Nothing good grows from the

I’m sorry, sorry, only those dark

branches and they will

get you from inside

urban life

20 feb 2013

N. Scott Momaday [pic by Christopher Felver]

from N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn:

When Angela returned that night to the Benevides house, she was alive to the black silent world of the canyon. The roadsides rushed through her vision in a torrent of gray-white shapes like hailstones coming forever and too fast from the highest reach of the headlights, down and away to nothingness in the black wake. She drove on, and she was sensible of creating the wind at her window out of the cold black stillness that lay against the walls of the canyon. Something she bore down upon and passed, a bobcat or a fox, before it sprang away, fixed her in its queer, momentary gaze, its round eyes full of the bright reflection of the lights and burning on in her vision for a time afterward, brighter than an animal’s eyes, brighter at last than the windows of the Benevides house, which mirrored her slow approach and stop. And there was the dying of the wind she had made, and of the motor and the light itself. And in her getting out and straining to see, there was no longer a high white house of stucco and stone, looming out against the leaves of the orchard, but a black organic mass the night had heaved up, even as long ago the canyon itself had been wrenched out of time, delineated in red and white and purple rock, lost each day out of its color and shape, and only the awful, massive presence of it remained, and the silence. It was no longer the chance place of her visitation, or the tenth day, but now the dominion of her next day and the day after, as far ahead as she cared to see. In the morning she would look at the Benevides house from the road, from her walk along the river, while eating an orange or imagining that she could feel, ever so little, the motion of life within her. She would see into the windows and the doors, and she would know the arrangement of her days and hours in the upstairs and down, and they would be for her the proof of her being and having been. She would see whether the hollyhocks were bent with bees and the eaves loud with birds. She would regard the house in the light of day. In fact it was secret like herself, The Benevides house. That was its peculiar character, that like a tomb it held the world at bay. She could clear her throat within, or scream and be silent. And the Benevides house, which she had seen from the river and the road, to which she had made claim by virtue of her regard, this house would be the wings and the stage of a reckoning. There were crickets away in the blackness.

July 28

The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn — an illusion still in the land — rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land . . .

Doris Stacy & Hilda Morley

Doris Stacy [pic by Alan Bernheimer]

from Doris Stacy’s Fledge: A Phenomenology of Spirit, 2012:

So we bring them to cage

honeysuckle let slide

know itself more than we

know so we pulse at once

in and out while the dips

coax your mouth sealed and mine

chimes

prehensile, whole

curlicue-paved, sails on.

Hilda Morley [pic courtesy of wood s lot]

from Hilda Morley’s Cloudless at First, 1989:

Advertisement

The catalogue said —

sea-scene

with surf rocks seabirds & in the background

a line of grey horizon

to the right: a scroll twelve inches by eighteen

inches, should I send for it?

Or are

the words enough?

The Chinese cranes arrive,

perch solemnly on the shore explore the seascape

and set the sea-air blowing here forever.

9 feb 2013

Valparaíso

Hello again. 

I've been in Chile — Santiago, Pichelemu, Talca, Pelluhue, Casablanca, Curacaví, Viña del Mar, Valparaíso, Santiago — eating, drinking, taking pix, reading Shea/Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy [fnord], & translating. 

Astonishing to find so many people we know living in Santiago, a first-world city.

Read here @ jacket2 a thoughtful introduction to language poetry in a review of The Grand Piano.

Murat Nemet-Nejat [pic courtesy of Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival]

from Murat Nemet-Nejat’s essay, Writing "The Structure of Escape": The Linearity of the Arc:

The frame of a Bresson movie is a jail
the escape is going outside that jail
it all starts with the noises one hears,
becoming one, knowing what the noises are.
that’s freedom.

from Murat Nemet-Nejat’s essay, “Questions of Accent”:

the word Oklahoma? A wild, alien, distant sound . . . an intimate sound, one of the rare words in English with vowel harmony . . . alien ground in which [the] private soul can nest itself, the synthesis between the powerful and the victim . . . What is the word Oklahoma after all, but the imprint of the Native American, the victim, the invaded in the language of the master. . . .

alienation, instability between writer and language, a radical skepticism about its ability to reveal inner truth constitute its essential nature. The relation of the poet to the language is inescapably confrontational. American English is the quintessential unnatural, insufficient, weak language which the writer has to bend, distort, to translate into, to interject his or her vision. To me, three nineteenth century writers, none of them Jewish but white protestant, embody this accented writing: Hawthorne, Melville and Dickinson. . . . Dickinson invents a language which only pretends to be English and must be read over and over again to be stripped into its message, a violent sadomasochism. Words are private emblems, the syntax unstable, constantly shifting, not quite an "English" syntax, the smooth "hymnal" surface hiding, shafted with a sadomasochistic violence. . . .

What do sun, father, Hunter, He, God, etc. (all images of authority) mean in [Emily Dickinson’s] work? Nothing. They are essentially blank emblems, a chain of Moby Dicks, completely stripped of their traditional associations, around which the poet weaves her barely decipherable soul. Under the deceptive music of a hymn, of a little embroidering lady, the blankness of these crucial images liberates/unhinges the syntax in the poems, completely privatizes it.

When In Santiago, visit Jardín Mapulemu, Bosque de la Tierra, in Parque Metropolitano de Santiago, to learn about the plants that grow in Chile: